Mirror Flourishing: The New Business North Star

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Mirror Flourishing: The New Business North Star

Posted 5.10.2016

David Cooperrider, PhD, Fairmount Santrol - David L. Cooperrider Professor in Appreciative Inquiry, discusses what he believes to be the most important business-for-good movement in the world today, the shift from sustainability to flourishing.

by David Cooperrider, PhD, Fairmount Santrol - David L. Cooperrider Professor in Appreciative Inquiry and Professor of Organizational Behavior

Nearly twelve years ago I was honored to bring the large group Appreciative Inquiry Summit method to a UN World Summit with Nobel Laureate Kofi Annan and hundreds of CEOs from corporations such as Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Daiwa Asset Management Ltd, Siemens AG, IBM, Tata Industries, Novo Nordisk, China Mobile, Royal Dutch Shell, Dow, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Novartis, and others such as the micro-enterprise pioneer Grameen Bank. Unexpectedly at this business and society Summit in the UN’s General Assembly Hall, we learned that we all shared a common conviction: that business has the opportunity to be one of the most positive forces on the planet, and that the epic transition to a world economy of ‘full-spectrum flourishing’ is no longer a utopian urge or mini-trend but an observable and astonishing trajectory.

That day over 2,000 stories of business and society breakthroughs poured in: innovations in business as a force for eradicating extreme poverty; business as a force for net-positive eco-regeneration and human thriving; and business as a catalytic agent for peace, reunion, and healing in some of the most extreme conflict zones in the world. With stories of empowering solutions, magnified strengths, and system-wide breakthrough realities in the room, there was a groundswell of what can only be described as an emotion of urgent optimism. “Let’s imagine the economy you most want to see.” The five hundred executives were asked: “what’s happening a generation from now in your image of the future that you most want to help create?” We repeated this future exploration three more times at the Global Forum for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, and here is the guiding image of the future that resonates...

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